


Lament of the Lost

by Ecstone517



Series: What it Means to Fly [1]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Hermitcraft RPF, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Avian Charles | Grian, Avian Tommyinnit, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Piglin Hybrid Technoblade (Video Blogging RPF), Wingza, Wither Skeleton Hybrid Wilbur Soot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:47:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29284785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ecstone517/pseuds/Ecstone517
Summary: Grian tries to come to terms with the fact that the most important part of his life is now the smaller portion of it.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: What it Means to Fly [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2165490
Comments: 12
Kudos: 196





	Lament of the Lost

Grian hadn’t wanted company today. From the moment the date had shifted over on his communicator he had just wanted to be alone.

Early in the morning that hadn’t been an issue and he distracted himself with doing work on his base. But the work began to drag up old and bittersweet memories and he found himself needing to distract himself from his distraction. On a normal day if Grian needed a distraction there were two that he defaulted to. Building and Pranking others. Building had of course become part of the problem, and he was not in a pranking mood. So that left Grian with nothing to do. Still wanting to be alone he ignored any messages sent his way. The others wouldn’t mind later, all he would have to say is that he had been busy and they would forgive him for ignoring them. Still, he didn’t want to be hanging around the base if they decided to come searching for him. So he made his way into the sky.

The sky has always been a second home to Grian. He could fly for hours until his wings ached without ever regretting it. And yet, on this day the feeling of wind between his features only made his heart feel heavy. He made it as far as the coastline before landing on a cliff side and settling down.

He looked out, nothing to see but the ocean and the sky. The two merged in the middle, the longer he starred the harder it was to tell which was which. The harder it was to keep his thoughts out of the past. Eventually it becomes impossible and his eyes drift closed.

He can still feel the wind in his feathers. The warmth of the sun on his back. He can hear the water lapping on the beach nearby. His brothers laughing as he loops around them. There’s a picnic spread out not far away, Wil had requested it. Tommy and their dad are sitting on the picnic blanket watching them play.

“Again! Again! Again!” is chanted at him as he touches down.

“Can’t…. too… tired.” He dramatically falls to the ground and pretends to have fallen asleep.

His brothers laugh again and pounce on him. Wilbur tugs at his hand trying to pull him up and make him show them some more tricks. Techno on the other hand is content to just flop across his back, careful not to hurt his tired wings.

It’s a perfect moment that Grian lives often in his dreams. And his nightmares. It’s the calm before the storm. The last memory he has of his family all together. Only hours after this he experienced the pain and fear of dying in a hardcore world and losing everything.

The moment last much longer than he initially assumed as he opens his eyes and finds the sun lowering in the sky. The sky has turned red and the sea reflects the distorted sunset. Grian reaches up and tugs on the leather cord thats around his neck. The pendant on it slips out of his red jumper and he absently rubs it between his fingers. The condensed redstone glows faintly, the chips of obsidian drawing in the light like the void in the end.

“Grian?”

Grian jumps at the sudden voice, his wings flare out in surprise almost launching him off the edge of the cliff. Grian turns to look at the instigator with something of an embarrassed glare.

“Sorry.” Xisuma says, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I didn’t expect to see you up here.”

“Is this a cliff a part of a project?” Grian asks instead of explaining his own presence.

“No.” Xisuma tells him, taking a seat on the ledge a few blocks away, “It’s just got a nice view. I like to come out here when Bdubs doesn't get to skip past the night.”

Now that the sun has gone mostly down Grian notices the lighting and spawn proofing that’s been done to the otherwise untouched area, revealing that it’s not as untouched at he had thought when he’d chosen here to sit here. Xisuma seems to realize that he doesn’t want to talk, or maybe it’s the admin that just wants to sit and enjoy the sunest himself. Either way silence falls between them. Grian’s mind begins to wander again.

This time it wanders to the reason he had decided to come out here in the first place. Today. Today is the marker. Today marks the day he is exactly twice the age he was when he first died. Thirteen years, two months, and eleven days. At the turn of the date, he’ll have been away from his home for longer than he was there.

It’s hard to believe. Harder than the first anniversary of his death had been. Harder than the fifth or tenth anniversaries had been.

This marks the moment when his home becomes the minority of his life.

He wants to hold his breath for it like the world is going to shift at the exact moment. He knows that it won’t. Nothing will change for him.

Then again, everything already has. His entire life had been nothing but change sense the moment he died. He went from living on a single world for his whole life to having lived on eight separate worlds and been an admin of three servers. He’d been homeless, essentially orphaned, and become someone people considered to be important, a champion, a master builder. He’d been invited to join a prestigious and select server of amazing people. This is what his life has been for the last Thirteen years, two months, and eleven days. So, he just doesn’t understand why he’s still homesick.

“That’s a hardcore heart isn’t it?” Xisuma’s voice cuts through his thoughts and makes him jump again, though not as drastically this time.

His mind catches up to the admin’s question and he gives a single nod and then tucks the pendent back into the collar of his jumper. He had never meant for anyone else to ever see it.

“Don’t take this the wrong way.” Xisuma starts, Grian shifts uncomfortably, “But I never took you for the hardcore type.”

A bittersweet smile tugs at his lips as the words process in his mind.

“To be fair, I never owned a hardcore world.”

“But you did live on one?” Xisuma asks.

“You could say that.” Grian says wistfully.

There’s a momentary lull there. Then Grian does something he never expected to do. He tells Xisuma the truth, or at least part of it.

“It was a glitched world.” He explains, “My dad owned it. He’d only had it for about a year before it glitched, and I spawned there.”

“Spawned there?”

Grian laughs sadly, “Like a baby zombie, but human, or hybrid. My dad told me that one moment he was working on his most recent build, and then the entire world went dark for a moment, like he’d fallen into the void. Then after a minute everything went back exactly how it was before, or so he thought until he heard me crying nearby. Despite that, there was no doubt I was my father’s son. We had the same hair and blue eyes, and the wings of course. Anyway, that was where I grew up.”

He smiles to himself, thinking back to how amazing the world had been, especially the things his dad would build.

“For a long time it was just me and my dad. He took care of me, taught me how to fly, how to build. He used to make up these amazing stories about the things he would build. Attributing a lot of them to gods that he made up. I was never really alone, he was really paranoid about my safety. He made me promise that if I wound up in the world hub I would wait by the portal until he got there. I didn’t know at the time that the only way to get out of a hardcore world was to die.”

Grian stares out into the ocean again. It’s reflecting the lights of the stars now.

“It sounds like your dad cared a lot about you.”

“He did. I thought that he would do anything for me. I’m sure he would have at the time. But after awhile it wasn’t just us anymore. When I was seven we were in the neither when the world glitched again. There was a bastion and a neither fortress right next to each other, and when the world when black we were trying to block off the entrance to the fortress because some of the piglins in the bastion were trying to get us. The moment the world blinked back into existence he pulled me close to him and wouldn't let me go for a long time, I think he was scared that I would disappear. A moment later we heard crying. We found Wilbur in the Fortress. He was pale and too skinny and I remember thinking he looked sick. But when dad picked him up and soothed him the crying didn’t stop and we realized it was coming from the bastion as well. He wouldn’t let me go back there with him. He made me stay walled in with Wilbur while he went there by himself. When he came back he was hurt, but he had Techno. We knew right away that Techno was a Hybrid. He didn’t have wings like dad and me, neither did Wilbur, but he had a little pig snout, and floppy piglin ears. We realized later that Wilbur was a hybrid too, a wither skeleton. I didn’t care, they were my brothers.”

“Sounds like this glitch was really something.”

“You could say that. It only happened one more time. When I was eleven. This time I was in the end realm with the twins. We always moved to wherever the project my dad was working on was. But he was away when it happened, gathering supplies in the Overworld. Wilbur freaked out when the world went dark. Went completely mental and refused to calm down until dad showed back up. When he did he had Tommy. Tommy was like Dad and I, same sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and wings as the both of us. I was excited about that. Don’t get me wrong, I love the twins, but I’d had to do a lot less flying sense they were born. Someone had to be on the ground with them after all. I never did get to fly with Tommy though.”

“Why not?”

Grian realizes at the question that Xisuma has gotten invested in the story. He’s leaning forward a little. Starring Grian down waiting expectantly for an answer. Grian pulls away a bit and grimaces.

“I died.”

Xisuma recoils like the words hurt him.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Honestly I’m surprised I made it that long. I’ve always been kind of reckless. But you know what happens when you die in a hardcore world.”

“You got kicked to the World Hub.” Xisuma responds, clearly seeing the way that this is going.

“The world Immediately banned me and I couldn’t get back in. I waited for three weeks for my dad to show up like he promised before I realized he wasn’t coming. I don’t blame him of course. We made that promise before Wilbur and Techno were born. It’s not like he could kill his own kids and himself just to get to me. Tommy was only three for Ender's sake.”

“So what did you do?”

Grian gives a half shrug, “I wandered around the world hub begging people to help me get back. No one could, but someone did let me stay on their world for a while. I bounced around a few worlds for a while, until I turned eighteen and started up a server of my own. It didn’t last very long. I made a couple of creative worlds that I shifted between. Got invited to be an admin in another server. Ultimately that didn’t last either. I gave it one more attempt before deciding I’m just not cut out for being an admin.”

“Wow, not many people give that up. I know I would feel weird without my admin panels.”

“I guess it just doesn’t feel right for me, it's too much power, too easy to misuse. Not long after that actually I got your invite to join here.”

Silence falls between them for a minute. Before Xisuma asks a burning question.

“Did you ever find your family again?”

“Not exactly.” Grian admits, his eyes start to water and he looks away from Xisuma, “I ran into them by accident when I was fifteen. You know what I saw? A happy family who had no idea who I was.”

“What?”

“Apparently, when I died the world realized there was a glitch and it corrected it. You see, the glitch broke Admin law, which states that children cannot live on a hardcore world for this exact reason. It corrected the glitch by converting the world into normal mode, with a respawn system. To do that it had to completely wipe the world and everything in it. With it all evidence that I had ever existed, including my family’s memory of me.”

“That’s horrible. Grian I’m so sorry. Finding that out must have been devastating.”

Grian gives a bitter laugh, “Finding that out had been relieving. The devastating part was looking at my little brother and him having no idea who I was. Devastating was seeing my Father for the first time in two years and him saying, ‘Nice to meet you, I’m Philza.’ Devastating was knowing that my family was better off for my death.”

“That’s not true.”

“But it is. Because of my death they were safe. They lived without fear of losing each other like I lost them. Let’s face it, if I hadn’t died when I did one of them might have. _Maybe_ it would have been my dad, if it was I _Might_ have been able to take care of the others, though there’s no guarantee. The world may not even have even realized there was a glitch if it hadn’t been one of us to die so we might have been trapped there by ourselves an no adult to keep us safe still under the same risk of this happening. Or _maybe_ it would have been Techno, or Wilbur, or Ender forbid Tommy to have died. And then they would be in my shoes except they would have been less than half my age and in no condition to look after themselves for a single day let alone for the rest of their lives. Best case scenario being that someone would have adopted them and looked after them, but honestly something much worse would have been much more likely. And if none of that happened, if I had died and the world hadn’t reset then they would have lost me and still be in danger of losing each other as well. So yes, they were better for it. I…” Grian’s rushed words are paused by the cracking of his voice, tears start to roll down his cheeks, “I have to believe that.”

Xisuma isn’t a very touchy person, but he can tell when someone needs a hug. Grian breaks down the moment he pulls him in for it. Sobs wrack him and Xisuma has to shift them away from the cliffside to ensure they don’t go over.

“I miss them so much!” Grian cries, “I would give _anything_ to have them back. I’m not ready for them to be the smaller part of my life.”

Xisuma holds him for as long as he needs. Even after the tears run dry and he stops shaking. When Grian does pull away he won’t look Xisuma in the eye. He pulls the sleeves of his jumper over his hands and uses them to rub the tear tracks off his face. Then he climbs to his feet. He looks a little unsteady standing there. He stares out at the full moon over the ocean with a distant look on his face.

“It’s gotten late and I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.” He eventually says with a hoarse voice, only then does he look at Xisuma again, shifting from side to side uncomfortably, “Listen, I’ve never told anyone about my family before, Please, just… keep this between us.”

“Of course.” Xisuma agrees instantly, “This isn’t my secret to tell.”

“Thanks.” Grian practically whispers and then throws himself off the edge of the cliff.

Xisuma knows that Grian is the best flyer he’s ever seen, with and without elytra. But there will always been a spike of panic seeing a friend jump off a high place. Especially a friend whose just unloaded a bunch of bottled up emotional trauma. He instinctively lurches towards the edge himself to try to catch Grian. He doesn’t make it in time but peering over the ledge reveals Grian gliding twenty blocks below. The avian has no trouble moving through the sky, even as obviously upset and tired as he is.

Xisuma wants to do something to help his friend. He thinks about it the whole hike back to his base, taking the land route for time to think and because he doesn’t trust himself in the sky distracted to this extent. He doesn’t come up with a clear answer as to what he can do. But he can’t not do anything so when he gets back to his base he immediately opens the admin panels and dives headfirst into some research. Grian gave him more than enough information to get quite far. He can’t help but be surprised by some of the names that he brings up, though Grian’s stories probably should have prepared him more for them. He still doesn’t know what he can really do to help by the time he has got to get some sleep. Still, before he logs off the admin panel Philza Minecraft, Technoblode, WilburSoot, and TommyInnit are added to the Hermitcraft whitelist.

**Author's Note:**

> I've come to realize that I drift from fandom to fandom at any given time. So I'm feeling good about this story but there is no guarantee that it will be continued. I'm posting it because I liked it and thought maybe you all would too. I am doing this at three in the morning though so maybe it's not half as good as I think right now. 
> 
> If it do continue this story I'll edit this chapter before posting a new one so please point out any spelling errors or confusing pieces and I'll try to sort it out.
> 
> Edit:   
> Thank you to everyone that has enjoyed, given kudos, and left comments on this story.  
> It felt rather complete here, but I kept thinking about it so I've decided to leave this as a completed work and turn it into a little series. I am posting a chapter of the sequel to this which will hopefully be a multi-chapter fic.


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